While one daughter stayed indoors to do baking, another daughter and I went out to dig paths, before the temperature dropped too far.
The main path, from the house to the front of the garage, gets dug wide enough for my husband to get through with his walker, or we can haul things from the van with the wagon. In the outer yard, we also maintain paths to the meter and the burn barrel. We decided against going to the dump today, but I was at least able to do a burn while shoveling, so we don’t have those bags taking up space any more.
The area around the cat shelter and the kibble house got cleared earlier this morning, as I dug the non-heated water bowls out of the snow. This afternoon, we dug out the paths to the kibble tray under the shrine, and I even dug out the path from their kibble house to the corner of the storage house, where they get in and out of the space under it.
Paths to the feeding station and compost ring are cleared, as well as this path from the compost ring to the back door of the garage. You can sort of see the path to the outhouse, too.
I also made sure to shovel the front of the garage, so we can swing open the doors to where my mom’s car is parked on one side, and where the lawn mowers and little Spewie are stored on the other.
It would probably be faster if I took Spewie out to clear the paths, but I really don’t want to fight with so much extension cord. For the main paths, the snow has been so light and fluffy, it’s almost easier to just shovel, and I don’t mind the exercise! I really ought to bring the little snow blower out, though. We have yet to make a path to the fire pit, and it would be good to have a path around the entire house. Especially to where the septic tank is, just in case.
It’s one thing to clear paths we’ve already been keeping up on, but when the snow is knee high, it’s a bit much to be breaking entirely new paths! LOL Mind you, the snow is deeper than the snow blower is high, so maybe it’ll be easier to shovel it, after all.
I do wish we’d been able to take the big snow blower in to be fixed over the summer. It would be quite handy right now!
Oh, my goodness, am I even more thankful our neighbour happened by and cleared our driveway for us a couple of days ago!
Because having this, on top of what was there before, would have been much harder to clear away with little Spewie! LOL
Yes, that’s our plowed driveway. Not even the deer have been going around.
We had blowing snow all night, and from how high it was on my boots, I’d say we got about 4 or 5 inches of new snow. Light and fluffy stuff, though, so easy to shovel. My husband had gone out to give food and water to the outside cats earlier. It had warmed up to -12C/10F, but by the time I went out, it had cooled down to -15C/5F, and as I write this, it has dropped to -16C/3F with a wind chill of -26C/-15F. The wind is now from the north west, though, so we’re pretty sheltered from it.
With the high winds we had blowing snow all night, I am seriously considering skipping our dump run today. It doesn’t look the like roads have been plowed yet. I had to get to the door at the back of the garage and found myself trudging through snow that was knee deep. I shoveled some of the paths, and either the girls or I will head out later to do the rest.
We’re supposed to get cold again for the next couple of days, then scream up to -5C/23F (or -8C/18F, depending on which app I’m looking at) on Tuesday. Even the gravel roads should be cleared by then, and that’s when the dump is open next. Maybe we will wait, since we also have to pick up packages at the post office.
Frankly, I’d much rather shovel snow then go out anywhere, anyhow!
You know, I can handle the -27C/-17F temperatures. Bundle up enough, and the only real problem is my glasses frosting over.
But that -44C/-47F wind chill, I could do without!
My husband was a sweetheart and was able to feed the cats outside this morning, so when I headed out, I only had to feed the birds/deer. Smart kitties were nowhere to be seen when I came out.
We had been fully prepared to hunker down and stay close to home for the next while. It has turned out to be the complete opposite! On Monday, I took advantage of a warmer day to stock up on more cat kibble, picking up a few other things while I was at it. Tuesday, I had to go to the post office to pick up the packaging for the satellite pieces we needed to return to our old IP. Today, it was back to the post office to send them off, so we don’t have to worry about getting dinged almost $400 for them. I’d shovelled the end of the driveway yesterday, to clear out the old plow ridge before the plow came by and added to it. The plows didn’t come by, but the end of the driveway was drifted over. Driving right now is a game of “can you find the road?” Hopefully, the plows will be out today, because tomorrow, I have to go out again, this time to help my mother with her grocery shopping, using her little car which means we probably won’t be able to do the dump run we’d planned. At least her car is a four wheel drive. It also had butt warmers in the seats.
I’ve become spoiled by butt warmers. And heat vents that work. ;-)
Friday looks like it’ll be a day I can finally stay home, but Saturday will be the first day it’ll be warm enough and the winds are expected to die down enough, that it’ll be safe to do more shoveling. Maybe even break out little Spewie and do some snow blowing. Saturday is likely when we’ll finally be able to do a dump run.
I just want to stay home! :-D And to think, by the middle of the month, we’re supposed to warm up to -10C/14F I’m quite looking forward to it!
I can’t complain, though. Around this time last year, we were getting slammed by a Polar Vortex, both our van and my mother’s car froze, we were snowed in, and we ended up having to ask my brother to do some shopping for us in the city and bring it over, because we couldn’t get out to do it ourselves. His vehicle could handle the cold and snow, even though they don’t have a garage and their cars are out in the elements. So right now, I’m thankful that we actually can go out and about, even if I’d rather we didn’t.
Another item for the list when we win the lottery: new vehicles that can handle the cold! The last time I looked it up, the Ram 1500 and the F150 were the two top vehicles for that, and both can come with plow attachments.
I recently crocheted pairs of fingerless gloves for my daughters, to help keep their hands warm while at their keyboards upstairs – the little ceramic heaters my husband got for them do keep things warm up there, but fingers still get chilled! Especially my older daughter’s drawing hand.
That left me with a few little balls of leftover yarn. I had a few things in mind to possibly make with them, so I kept them in a bag of yarn I keep by my office chair.
Tissue discovered them.
For nearly two weeks now, I’ve been finding them all over. I’ve followed trails of yarn down to the basement. I’ve unwound yarn from around the dining table and chairs. I’ve had to untangle them from the wheels of my office chair. I’ve discovered yarn barfs in cat hair dust bunnies the size of Alberta. I’ve repeatedly had to untangle the yarn and rewind the balls. Any potential projects I had in mind went out the window, as there was just no way to get all the cat hair out of them.
While Tissue has been the one so dedicated to pulling out these balls of yarn, no matter how covered or hidden they were, once the yarn was out, there was usually several other cats involved in the destruction by the time I find them.
I couldn’t let the yarn go to waste, so I figured, what the heck. They want the yarn that badly, I’ll make a mat for them and they can have it. It’s not like it can be used for anything else than cat toys, now!
While I was working, I had the two balls of yarn at my feet while stitching and watching a video on my computer. Part way through, my husband wanted to look up some information about my video card, so I put the mat aside by my keyboard and stepped away for a bit. There was just a couple of minutes in between my husband leaving my computer, and my returning to it. In that time, I found I had to unwind the red yarn from the wheels of my office chair again, and both strands had been chewed through. I had to knot them together to be able to continue. Which I normally wouldn’t do with crochet, but it’s for the cats, and they don’t care if there are knots.
I finished off the leftover yarn and gave the cats their new mat.
Which they are now completely ignoring.
I have made a number of mats and cat beds for them. Usually, the moment the item hits the floor, there’s a cat on it, checking it out. I’ve never made one out of yarn they’ve been so eager to steal and play with before.
Not one came over the check this one out. Not even to sniff at it.
One of the things we got in the mail today was the packaging to send back parts of our old satellite internet system that need to be returned. It came with return postage, instructions and even a strip of packing tape to close the box up again!
Now, I finally know the names of the different parts. :-D
With my brother trying to mount the new dish to the old supports, one of the satellite dishes was already dismantled and in the basement. The other, however, still needed to remove the radio from the dish on the roof. I had been thinking it could be done after the weather improved, but it’s supposed to get worse over the next couple of days, not better. So my darling daughters dug the ladder out, and one of them climbed up to remove it. She ended up having to cut the coax cable, because it was stuck, but we were able to get that off, later.
With one of the radios already being indoors, we could pack it up with the modem, power supply and power cord, and it’s ready to go.
For the other one, we’ll have to wait for the rest of the snow to melt off, and for it to dry, first.
I’d already brushed off as much as I could before I took the above photo!
Which means we’ll be ready to return them tomorrow morning, or the day after, if I don’t get out before the store closes at noon. Since it’s postage paid, I could theoretically leave it in the mail box outside the building, but I don’t think the boxes will fit! :-D
You know, for all the issues we had with our internet, we actually got good customer service with them. They simply don’t have the equipment necessary to meet our needs, in our location. Having to have two satellites just to get enough data for our household was bad enough – mostly on our budget. As I write this, I can see the live feed from our garage security cam, and every now and then, it’s a whiteout from blowing snow. In weather like this, we would have had no end of connectivity issues, if not losing our connection entirely. With the new Starlink system, there have been no issues at all. With no data limit and the monthly bill less than half what we were paying, our old provider just can’t match it. At least not for our geographical area. I know in more urban areas, they can be much more competitive. In that respect, I would still recommend them. Just not for anyone living in the boonies, like we do!
It was awesome meeting the delivery in a parking lot, like we were doing some sort of drug deal. :-D
So, 125 pounds of packaged cuts, plus the extra breakfast sausages we picked up, fit into four boxes, which also fit perfectly into our little utility wagon.
One box was almost all beef bones. The plastic bag has the sausages. I’ve never made bone broth before, and I’m really looking forward to giving it a go!
One box had stew meat and different cuts of steaks.
It has been AGES since I’ve had a good steak!
A third box was all roasts and ribs, and the fourth was all ground beef.
We did have things in the freezer before putting this in, but right now, it’s mostly beef in there. I kept out a couple of packages of breakfast sausages to thaw out, and also took a prime rib roast for the fridge freezer. We’ll be having that for New Year’s.
I’ve never done prime rib before. It’s going to be awesome!
We won’t be getting a lot of frozen stuff when we do our big shop before Christmas – there’s hardly any room left!
We’re shooting to get a half pig for next fall. Which means that, unless we get a bigger or a second freezer, or start canning quite a lot of meat (which I plan to do), we won’t have room for more than a quarter beef as well. I’d like to get a half beef next time, though, so that is something we will keep in mind over the summer. My parents had two freezers; one just for meat, and one for everything else. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a second one, though we’ll have to figure out what we want to take out of the old kitchen to fit on. We’ve got seating in there right now, to enjoy in the summer, but didn’t really use it much.
We’ll figure it out.
For now, we are well stocked with enough beef to last us for a good while!
As much of an inconvenience it was to set up our new Starlink system in the winter has been, it looks like it was good timing. It looks like we’re all getting our OS updates, and with each of us having our own desktops, that would have done a number of our data limits!
My computer downloaded the update when I shut it down last night. When I started it up this morning, after doing my morning rounds, it spent the next while updating and restarting itself until it was done.
I did remember to get photos of the finished set up, this morning.
You can see where my brother ran the wire across, above where the old cables were. The one that’s hanging down was from the dish that was removed, which was the only one that had a connector. I’ll have to go back and tie it off so it doesn’t blow around in the wind, as soon as I can, until we can take it the rest of the way down.
Plus I’ll re-wrap the excess cable and make it tidier. My brother was a bit enthusiastic about making sure it was secure to the wall, so I’m not in any hurry to take out those screws! :-D Hopefully, I’ll be able to use the same screw holes when I put it back, because I sure don’t want to make more of them!
I did a speed test on my phone while I was at the burn barrel in the outer yard. Not too shabby!
This is my desktop, taken just this evening.
We have better signal in the outer yard than I have in my office! :-D
It’s still pretty darn good. Especially when I checked checked the outage log on the Starlink app. There were just three of them in the past 12 hours. Not sure what could obstruct it up on the roof like that. One, shortly before noon, shows the signal was obstructed for 10 seconds. The other two were just a minute apart. One was “no signal received” for 3 seconds, and the other was “network issue” for 13 seconds.
We never noticed any of these.
The app has a visibility check, showing any obstructions it is picking up from its current location – which is handy, since we have no way to get up there and do a check with a phone – and there are just the tiniest bits of red showing in a few places on the edges. Most of it is clear view, in all directions.
Since we got set up, my husband has tested its limits. There were some games he was curious about and downloaded them, tried them, then uninstalled most of them. There was one game he’d tried before, but it was unplayable. He’s now able to play it. Even my daughters, who play Star Wars in the evenings, have had a number of problems they were having simply disappear. For my older daughter, it’ll mean she’ll be better able to upload files, which will free her up to do more complicated, data heavier pieces, such as her animations and videos.
So far, we all are really, really happy with the improvements!
We were perfectly willing to wait until spring before setting our new Starlink dish up permanently on the roof, but my brother wasn’t. Not at all!
Of course, it turned out to be more difficult than even he expected.
One of the first things he wanted to do – while it was still relatively warm and the sun was bright – was seal the ridiculously large hole we had to make to fit the widest part through (I still don’t know what it’s called) with caulk. He even used his heat gun on it to cure the surface a little bit, before continuing. It’ll take longer to cure because of the cold, but at least tomorrow, we’re supposed to get above freezing.
Then one of the satellites was removed (except the part you can see on the roof), leaving the stand, which we were expecting to be able to use to hold the Starlink dish.
Well, it turned out to be much larger than the support post on the dish. My brother thought he could squeeze it to fit, but the metal turned out to be way too strong. He struggled for nearly an hour up there, using tools I’ve never seen before, before finally giving up. We would have to use the stand it came with. Which meant removing the existing tripod, first. We really didn’t want to make new holes in the roof, but there was no option available for us at the time.
Removing the original support required removing ice and snow.
The ice dam was about six inches deep in places, and he had to clear it all the way to the edge on one side, first to remove the coax cable that was already there – and affixed to the roof in a couple of places – then to be able to run the new cable across. Which also required moving the ladder.
This would have been a LOT easier in the summer!
My brother put most of the screws he took out, back into the roof after, to make sure there were no open holes for water to get in. In the summer, we’ll have to remember to fill them.
Once everything was clear, it didn’t take long at all to install it.
I didn’t get a good picture of the completed job, but once the stand was secure, the cable was run across the roof, then across the side of the house, before running down to where it enters the house. There was a huge amount of excess cable – it comes with 150 feet – which was quickly wrapped and secured to the wall. In the spring, I’ll take it down and redo it neatly, but for now, he just needed to get it up and tucked away, where it’s protected.
By the time he was done, it was starting to get dark, and he just dashed off home – but not until after he made sure the parts of the satellite dish were tucked away into the old basement! There is still one piece of the support attached to the roof, but there was no need to remove it, for now.
The unexpected thing is just how much the new dish is pointing north. Those tree branches are actually an obstruction! According to the app, we should expect signal interruption every 17 minutes. The app actually tracks that stuff. Looking at the log now, the last time we had an outage, it was because there was “no signal received”, and it lasted for only 2 seconds. It was happened more than 3 hours ago. In fact, looking at the log, the outages happened pretty much only during the time it was being physically moved around and frankly, I’m amazed there was any signal at all during some of those times. While my brother was working on trying to fit on the existing support, I had to pass the dish up to him several times. I had the base on the shelf against the sun room window, so I could safely put it down in between tests. Several times, the dish started to move, looking for a signal. This was almost right up against the house, and partly under the eaves. How it managed to get any signal at all amazes me. Especially considering the dish is facing North, and the house itself would have been obstructing the signal!
I do have to say some positive things about our Xplornet dishes. They are rock solid, they were installed very well, and we usually had decent speed on it. If we got enough signal strength for it. And that was the problem. We just kept losing our signal. Even when they had tech guys coming out, according to their equipment, we should have had a good clear signal, and they never did figure out why we weren’t. That doesn’t even take into account the problems we would have in high winds, or if there was bad weather to the south of us. The problem just kept getting worse and worse, too.
That will be the big test with this system. How does it hold out in bad weather? So far, we’re expecting things to get colder, the closer we get to Christmas, but there are no storms on the horizon, or even high winds. It might be a while before that test finally happens.
I am now writing this post while hooked into our Starlink internet.
Oh, my goodness, what a difference!
It was not without issues, though.
The first thing I had to do was some shovelling.
I had to use the ice chipper to break up the snow before I could shovel a path to the corner, where the current cables enter the house.
We had talked about pulling one of these out and drilling the hole better, but they are well sealed, plus on the inside of the house, not very accessible. We decided to make the new hole higher.
Using their app, I found a clear spot off the path to the kibble tray under the shrine and dug it out.
Which got immediately claimed.
Before drilling a hole, though, we needed to pick up some more sealant, so a quick run into town and a visit to the hardware store was in order.
That turned out to be… not quite what we needed.
Once we had the inside parts inside, we set the dish itself up, so we could fuss with the cables.
I am going to be much happier when this is on the roof!
Then the issues started. Drilling a hole through the wall.
A log wall.
We have a long set of drill bits that go up to half an inch, which is wide enough for the end of the cable. It’s too bad we couldn’t just use the coax that was already there, but it is what it is.
Except…
Just a few inches from the end of the new cable, there is a wider part. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s wider than half an inch. Still, we did create a half inch hole through the wall, almost 2 feet higher than the other cables. This was a pain, because my drill sucks and the chuck key is stripped. We still needed a larger hole, though, and that meant a trip to the basement, were I remembered a set of spade drill tips we found when cleaning the basement out.
We ended up having to drill a 7/8th inch hole, from both sides, because the spade tips were not long enough to go all the way through.
That is a large hole!!
We still couldn’t get the cable through. So for the next while, we used the long bit to try and smooth out whatever the wide part of the cable was getting caught on, somewhere in the middle. Having to drill the larger hole from both sides caused a “bend” in the hole, and the wider part of the cable, which is inflexible, was too long to get past.
Eventually, it got done, and the cable made it through. My daughter pulled through a few feet of slack, then set up the inside parts. As soon as the dish had power, it set itself.
I foresee a problem! :-D
It’s only temporary.
While still outside, I used the app on my phone to set up our account, then my daughter and I tucked away the extra cable, until we can set things up permenently.
By the time we were finished fighting with it, I completely forgot to take a photo of the hole. It looks so ridiculously big for the cable that’s running through it. We’re going to need to pick up some sort of spray foam to seal it properly. For now, it’s got some fibre fill shoved in, on the inside, to keep the wind out.
After using my phone to set up the Starlink, I went ahead and did a speed test.
Not too bad at all!
Now, download and upload speeds were not something we had much to complain about. Especially my husband. His computer is set up right next to the router, so he can plug a cable right in. He hasn’t been able to use WiFi since his Windows OS updated a while back. This is what he got.
Which is just insane!!! Wow!!!
The girls upstairs got hooked up and immediately noticed a difference, though I don’t think they’ve got speed test software on their machines.
Once I was settled in and hooked up, I went to a few places where I knew I would see a difference, if there was any. Images on Pinterest, for example, which loaded without issue, or Discord, which has always been a huge problem for me. It also connected almost immediately.
I didn’t have speed testing software on my desktop, so I downloaded some and did a test.
Before I show you the test results, however, keep in mind that I am in what’s probably the worst place in the house for WiFi, even with a booster.
Yes. My download speed was 0.16mbps. My upload speed was faster at .23mbps
Out of curiosity, I did another test on my phone, while sitting at my desktop.
Yeah, even my phone’s WiFi sucks in my office corner.
I tested my desktop again, after waiting a few minutes, and it did improve.
Then a few minutes later…
Yes. This is an improvement.
There was, however, a different problem.
Once we got this set up, my husband called our satellite provider and suspended both our internet accounts with them. We will test the Starlink for a couple of weeks before we cancel our old accounts. We won’t need to switch from one account to the other, part way through the month, and we no longer have data limits. It all comes down to how stable and reliable the connection is.
Then, because our old router was still pushing out signal, my husband unhooked the old satellite routers (that will need to be returned when/if we cancel) and turned off our router.
Suddenly, I no longer had a live feed to our garage security camera. The one that lets me keep an eye on the driveway and gate. Because the camera is so far from the house, we have a set up that hooks into our internet system via the electrical wires, and is then plugged into our router, which has something like six ports on it.
The router the Starlink system came with had only one port available.
We talked about it for a bit, then my husband went looking. He found a fix for his computer, and was able to start using his WiFi, and was able to hook our IP camera to the Starlink router. I now have a live feed again!
My husband’s computer, however, has gone down to 158.49 mbps download and 12.65 mbps upload. I just tested my phone. It’s at 52.6 for download and 9.2 for upload right now. My desktop is…
… 4.78 mbps download and 0.71 mbps for upload.
Excuse me while I don’t feel sorry for him. :-D
You know what I think I’m going to do?
I think I’m going to make some popcorn, go online and watch a full length movie or something. At highest resolution.
When we first signed up for it, we read that it would be sent by mail. After it was ready to be sent and fully paid for, my husband started getting notifications about FedEx delivery. Which was weird for our area, but whatever. It was due for delivery yesterday but, as I had mentioned in my posts, it never arrived.
This morning, my husband got an email telling him it was successfully delivered by FedEx
???
Well, it wasn’t delivered here, so we were really hoping it got dropped off at the general store the post office is in. This has happened before, when a delivery driver couldn’t find our place.
When I got to the post office, I asked about a package from FedEx, while getting the mail. There was a whole bunch of packages in and…
One of them was our Starlink system.
Yeah. It was sent by mail.
*sigh*
I ended up swinging past home to drop off the mail with my husband, who was waiting at the gate with the wagon, because there we no longer room in the car for my mother’s walker!
While I was at my mom’s, my husband checked it out, but we can’t set it up yet. We need to put a wire through the wall, but it’s possible we can use one of the existing holes for the co-ax running to the satellites. I’m pretty sure they’re weather sealed, though. We’ll have to dig our way to that part of the wall, first. We will most likely set it up in the middle of yard temporarily, until we can safely access the roof to install in permanently. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, my visit with my mother went rather well. I brought her the honey she asked me to get for her, and I did bring some pierogi that we made last night for her to try. When she asked what kind of filling they had and I told her, she made some comments about how she’d never used mushrooms before, but didn’t say anything negative, so that was a good start. We had lunch, then I helped her with her errands, then stayed for a bit of a visit after putting away her groceries. There were a few attempts by her to bring up her … hot topics, shall we say, but I managed to distract her from what usually devolves into racist rants. At one point, she started asking me if I wanted to be “healthy”, so I knew that was going to go weird. It turned out to go back to her visit here, to see the finished sign, then used wanting to see how nice the inside of the old outhouse looked as an excuse to get into things. One of those was fighting her walker through the back door of the garage to look for things she could criticize me about. It took a few weeks, but she finally brought up about the cans. We’ve been bagging our aluminum cans to eventually sell to a scrap dealer. We’ve got about 4 years of cans stored in a corner of the garage. Most of them are cat food cans, and sometimes critters tear the bags apart, so everything needs to be rebagged. My mother, of course, only saw the pop cans. Or what she assumed was pop cans. There are V8 cans in there, too. They’re the same cans she complained about, 3 years ago.
We don’t actually use cans all that much.
Anyhow, she has decided that these are all pop cans, and that means we drink nothing but soda, and that’s why I’m fat, and because I’m fat, that must mean I’m unhealthy. Never mind that she’s been fat for as long as I can remember, and aside from things like injuries or hernia surgery, I don’t remember her ever being sick. When I pointed out that most of those cans are cat food, she just gave me a condescending look, because of course I’m lying. Right?
I managed to distract her from that, though, and the conversation continued. At one point, grocery shopping came up, and I decided to take a chance. I told her about the quarter beef that we’ll be getting soon, how many pounds of meat we were getting, and some of the cuts. Now, this was part of a conversation about the cost of groceries, so buying 125 pounds of beef like this is saving money from having to buy in the store. So what did my mother get out of it?
She wants me to be healthy. She doesn’t want me to be sick and die. Because apparently, buying enough grass fed beef to last us for months is going to kill me? Apparently, I’m going to sit there and eat 125 pounds of beef, all at once? Or maybe it’s because she has been convinced that red meat is bad, even though we used to raise our own beef, butcher it and fill our freezers with it, for decades and never got sick? Whatever her reasoning, our buying a quarter beef is somehow supposed to kill me.
I have to admit. That’s a new one.
Still, overall, it was a good visit, and I was glad to see her stocking up on things, taking advantage of me being there with her car and able to carry them for her.
I’m glad to be home, though. These visits are very psychically draining! There’s just no way of knowing if something well suddenly trigger her.
As for the Starlink system, it’s already getting too dark, so we’ll have to work on that tomorrow. :-)
The Re-Farmer 